Experiencing the journey of life

Keep Face or Face Your Fears

One might think that it’s easier to keep face rather than facing one’s fears but in the end facing one’s fears will be the easier of the two options. You see, when one keeps face in order to avoid one’s fears the thing they are keeping face eventually becomes the new fear. The fear of being found out that you’re a fraud or that the charade you are keeping up will come crumbling down like a house of cards. So until you agree to face your fears you learn to be a talented juggler of life’s shenanigans. Yet no matter how strong one’s arms might be they will eventually grow weary and begin to drop pieces of the puzzle they have created. As the pieces begin to drop they either birth new stories to replace those that have been exposed OR they begin to face their fears. Either way the person will engage in scary, emotionally draining experiences. The difference between these two options is that facing one’s fears will allow freedom to embrace that individual as they fall into truth, while keeping face will greet them with walls of painful isolation.

It has been a year of being pulled between these two choices for me. Imagine a magician pulling a scarf from their sleeve and with each exposed scarf one faces their fears as they are brought into the light from the darkness of the sleeve. With each pull to expose a new scarf the magician (and the audience) ache with anticipation and excitement for all the scarfs to come into the light, but there is a process of pulling that has to take place before this happens. It is this pulling that I’ve been experiencing over the past year. As I faced each of my fears I feared that I would be too drained to pull the next scarf into the light. Alas, I’m reaching into my sleeve and touching the last scarf and beginning to pull the scarf out. As the magician of the shenanigans in my life I am worried that the trick won’t work … or that something will happen in the process to make me stop pulling on the scarf, but I know the time has come for the keeping of face to stop. No matter how painful this last scarf might be I know it will be the release of a very long and painful year of scarf pulling, of facing fears, of becoming myself more and more.

Let the audience (and magician) prepare to have the final portion of this trick come to an end. One more scarf. One more pull. One more facing of fears. One more year of life. One more step into freedom. One more chance to embrace life more fully. One more . . .

Be who you were meant to be, who you truly are and stop keeping face and face your fears. For it is in the facing of fears that one is released of those fears and welcomed into sweet freedom of truth.